Ravensara Aromatica – a confused tale.

Taxonomy is the science of naming things. Botany is the
science or study of plants.Combining
the two produces the scientific or Latin names that help identify species. In
recent years the population, and in particular gardeners, will have seen a
number of name changes which has led to a lot of confusion as to what something
really is. For example, a classic example in the English-speaking world is
bluebell. In England, this refers to Hyacinthoides non-scripta, in Scotland
to Campanula rotundifolia, in Australia to Sollya heterophylla
and in North America to species of Mertensia.

As with many things, the reason for this increasing confusion
has at its heart politics. Within the European Union there is a drive for what
we may euphemistically call harmonisation. It is better defined as
standardisation. The mind of the EU has in terms of bureaucracy a distinct
communist flavour. The new accession countries having just given up this system
will know precisely what I mean when I say that a Dill plant growing in Poland
should behave and grow as a Dill plant placed in France at least according to
the bureaucrats. Unfortunately, nature doesn’t conform this way so the
bureaucrats have been at trouble to try to remove from sale cherished and old
national seed varieties, making them in fact illegal to reproduce. The loss of
gene pool resources was little thought of until the process was well under way.
It was of course non-governmental organisations that first picked up this loss and
institutions like the Henry Doubleday Institute in the UK pioneered the
retention of valuable species and varieties that the EU in its harmonic wisdom
had decided were no good for society for one reason or another.

Consecutive with these changes was, of course, the impetus
that was given to the production of European new varieties. It also opened the
door to the patenting of these new varieties, which were themselves more often
than not reliant upon precise fertiliser input, herbicide and pesticide use
enabling a virtually guaranteed wall to wall production throughout Europe
favouring the largest companies. Unsurprisingly the common man or woman gets a
little confused as to what is really going on and why there is the necessity to
change the text books.

Political interference is not a new phenomenon, especially
in the continent of Europe. The French and British in particular have been
antagonistic for as long as one can remember. The British won the
empire-building race, often at the expense of the French. Neither have the
French really forgiven the British for Waterloo or together with the Americans,
for getting their country back and giving them a seat at the United Nations on
the Security Council! This old antagonism today surfaces in the way that the
French language has been has been down graded as the “lingua franca” of the
world by English. French bureaucrats hate the spread of anglicised words and even
have special laws about it.

This empirical battle even spread to botany. In the world of
scientific knowledge British and French explorers slogged it out around the
world, discovering plants and sending them back to Europe, giving them Latin
names. Sometimes they classified them the same and sometimes differently. When
a plant’s name is written out in full in Latin at the tail end will be the name
of the person the plant was named after or discovered by. For example
Eucalyptus globules La Balladiere. (Clearly a Frenchman won this particular
point!) This empirical battle of the experts is at the root of why our
bureaucrats found it necessary to try to harmonise things and the French
methodology seems to be winning that battle.

We can view such matters in an amusing light and it does
give rise to some problems. As hinted above, there is a real concern that
creeping standardisation has a clear political agenda in supporting the large
companies, particularly those that are multi national in a European context. If
there is a contract between capital and government, then standardisation is
simply a control mechanism for labour. Certain parts of legislation are used to
blind the population at large with what is really going on. The well-known
British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, openly referred to EU Health and
Safety policies as “creeping socialism through the back door”. Her analysis has
been shown to be very accurate.

Why should we be discussing such matters? Ask any
Aromatherapist a few years ago what was their favourite oil for diseases caused
by viral infections and you would probably get the answer Ravensara.Life was simple, very few people actually
sold Ravensara, and we all know what it was and where to buy it from.

My introduction to Ravensara came many, many years ago –
even before I was involved with essential oils – when I first met Pierre
Franchomme who, well over 25 years ago, was promoting the oil. Not so long
after, Fragrant Earth introduced the oil because Teddy Fearnhamm and latterly
Ulla Maia Grace were wanting to promote the material for its spectacular
success for its anti viral properties.

I also remember a conference that Teddy Fearnhamm must have
attended at which it was suggested that Ravensara was no more than Camphor. The
information I supplied to her, which must now be some 18 years ago, was that
this was quite wrong and that the essential oil of Ravensara did not even begin
to resemble Camphor, which it does not. However, that has proved to be not the
whole story.

If you look on the current Price List of Fragrant Earth
today you will see a very strange thing.An essential oil called Ravensara but the Latin name attached to it
would be Cinnamonum camphora and in small print, in brackets, the name
Ravintsera applied to it.

Quite regularly we now get letters from customers querying
this or sometimes even telling us that we don’t know what we are talking about.
Having introduced the oil, researched the oil for so many years, I think we do.
However, I wonder if the botanists past and present really knew what they were
dealing with. One thing that everybody seems to agree about is that the
original Ravensara promoted by Franchomme was a member of the Lauraceae
family.

The name Ravensara is now commonly used throughout the world
simply because when we introduced it, in the English language it just rolls
naturally off the tongue. It is an easy word to pronounce and so the Latin name
has also become the common name. Originally we would have written the name Ravensara
aromatica and frankly this is how I continue to think of the plant. A quick
review of the literature would find the following names that experts have been
applying to the Ravensara used by Aromatherapists:

Ravensara
aromatica

Evodia
aromatica

Evodia
Ravensara

Agathophyllum
aromaticum

Agathophyllum
Ravensara

Ravensara
anisata

Laurus
aromatica

Cinnamomum
camphora

This confusion is best left to the Botanists to sort out. However,
it does cause difficulties to the user. As an illustration if Coffee was
renamed Tea and visa versa what would you drink? Would you change your taste
just because the name changed? I don’t think so. This is a most important point
for those using Ravensara in Aromatherapy.

Perceived wisdom of the moment is that Ravensara as
used by the early promoters of oil is actually Cinnamomum camphora. We will
discuss how and why this is used in a moment but let’s go back to confusion in
the trade. You will remember the conference I referred to above where some
expert was saying that Ravensara was no more than Camphor. What this did, of
course, was to allow some unscrupulous traders who were unable to source proper
Ravensara to start promoting ordinary Camphor. Now unfortunately there is a
tendency, especially among the British, to believe that everything can be
bought cheaper. So, we can see that for a while Ravensara became a little
suspect, hence the emphasis that companies like Fragrant Earth or Saffron Oils,
under the aegis of Teddy Fearnhamm, remain proponents of true Ravensara and
promoted the idea of provenance or authentic oils. This authenticity has always
been the position of Fragrant Earth since its inception, for professional
Aromatherapists.

Undoubtedly, as can be seen from the names above, botanists
have a continuing argument as to what Ravensara really is. Because we are
increasingly governed by directives encouraging standardisation or legally
enforcing changes Fragrant Earth now uses the Latin name Cinnamomum camphora.
Frankly, it’s not our business as to what botanists decide the plant is called.
Our business is to make sure that what we sold 20 years ago is still being sold
today, because that oil works and it is the one that all clinicians are
familiar with. At the time another oil Ravensara anisata was available in small
quantities. It was hardly used and never promoted and considered by some to be
on the toxic side.

Most suppliers are far removed from the source of supply and
they have to rely on things like GLC traces not knowing where their material
comes from. This raises other issues. Reliance on a GLC is all well and good
but the testing laboratory is only going to standardise based upon commercial
samples that are given in the first place. If you think it through, those
commercial samples can be very varied. Let’s take as an example the following. A
laboratory asks for a sample of Cinnamomum camphora. Correctly the laboratory
has asked for the Latin name because that’s more accurate than the common
names. In their opinion, so far so good. If you now look at a list of essential
oils, under Ho Wood or Leaf, you will also see Cinnamomum camphora. So with
which does the laboratory get supplied? Cinnamomum camphora is a very varied
species with quite specific geographic sub species and chemo types of essential
oil. Room for error is obvious.

The home of Ravensara aromatica is Madagascar. Madagascar, as
we may have seen from various TV programmes, is a unique place on earth. It is
a huge island – the fourth largest in the world.– Off the African coast in the Indian Ocean.
It has a flora that is very special.When a plant is confined to a specific place, it is called endemic. Much
of the flora of Madagascar is endemic. Madagascar, hardly on the tourist list,
is considered a paradise for naturalists. About 11,000 species are endemic,
only to Madagascar. Unsurprisingly, Madagascar is therefore a conservationist’s
priority. Since Madagascan is subject to deforestation, the island is inundated
with environmentalists and botanists. New species are still being
discovered.

The colonising country most associated with Madagascar is
France and the first explorations by botanists date from the mid 1600s. Those
of you familiar with the Ravensara aromatica listings will have noticed the
name Sonnerat after the naming of the species. The Sonnerat collection period
dated from 1768 and Mnsr Sonnerat and his uncle, the then Governor of Mauritius
– another Indian Ocean island – collected plants from Madagascar. The Indian
Ocean became a centre of flora exchange, species being transported from one
island to another, from mainland India, Indonesia, right the way through to the
African coasts. Unsurprisingly, introduced plants to Madagascar mainly come
from Mauritius along with Sri Lanka and Indonesia. The nearby African coast
came under British control and we must not forget the Dutch who controlled much
of the original spice trade.

Coming nearer to our own time, in the 20th
century the French colonial governments promoted the cultivation of aromatic
plants for use in cosmetics and perfumery. Madagascar became well known for its
Geranium, Ylang Ylang and Clove oil.

Due to the increasing popularity of Aromatherapy in the USA
Ravensara has become sought after by that market. With grant aid from a variety
of sources, new plantations and distilleries have been set up. Such grant aid
always attracts academics, marketing experts and the usual bureaucracy that our
society of scientific little boxes sets in motion. Each and every turn has to
have an expert other than, of course, the indigenous or native population who
in scientific terms never know what they are talking about. This applies to
many medicinal plants. Eventually an active principle may be identified and
isolated a clone developed. By that time and at that point rather cynically the
exploiting company or academic institution will have almost certainly set up a
commercial situation that will certainly disadvantage those that knew about the
properties in the first place. Let us hope that Ravensara by whatever name
survives the process!

The EU, unbelievably, has allowed the patenting of plant
applications in recent times. These patents rest mostly upon “discovery” of
traditional uses. This is a gross abuse of our civil liberties and indeed our
birthright, whereby indirectly we all own the natural plant resources of the
planet. Patents should be about discoveries we don’t know about, not about what
we do know about. An analysis of a particular substance is no more than that
and its effects should not be patentable.

Let us now turn to the traditional position of those who
introduced Ravensara essential oil to the rest of the world. The local
population sees and uses two trees.One
tree smelled strongly of aniseed and was termed Ravensara anisata. It is
found as a tree up to 20m high with a reddish strongly aromatic smell. The tree
has small green flowers. It grows in the difficult mountain terrain and as an
endemic species is under conservation controls. This tree, the least used, had
the common name of Havozo or Avozo. Ravensara anisata has not been popular
among Aromatherapists. It is the bark that is used for distillation although
more recently the leaves\ are being distilled. Its distinguishing chemical
feature has been Methyl Charvicol and Anethol. Botanists have now in their
wisdom decided that Ravensara aromatica and anisata is one and the same
thing.

The native population has used and called a popular tree and
resultant oil or brew Voaravintsara or Ravintsara and at today’s date is
botanically classified as Cinnamomum camphora. Confused? It’s just a name
change or clear up. Certainly the oils of the two trees are quite different. It
does not seem to me at Fragrant Earth too much of a problem as what I buy, sell
and use is what I used in therapy for the last many years. The source has
remained the same, the indigenous people have remained the same and they know
what they are doing.

Elsewhere on Madagascar the new distilleries have obviously
had to make up their mind what they are selling and at the end of the day oil
suppliers will have to comply with the names and terminology that is imposed
upon the species. So in effect for me and for a large number of therapists
confusion arises only if and when they switch supplier or if and when new
textbooks begin to be written.

The best approach I believe to be as follows – and this is where
analysis becomes useful. Let the botanists argue as to what something is. We as
therapists however have the choice of three materials – one that is rich in
Cineole, commonly called in the past in Aromatherapy Ravensara (now
Ravintsara); two that are rich in Methyl Charvicol commonly called in
Aromatherapy Ravensara anisata (but now for commercial reasons too increasingly
called R.aromatica) from the bark of the tree and one from the leaves. None
should be confused with Cinnamomum camphora from the Far East, Ho Wood or Ho
Leaf, Linalool rich. This is a simple way of avoiding confusion.

I don’t want to get into the situation of being the
definitive guru on Ravensara. The sketch above probably outlines further
battles over nomenclature to come.It is
up to the supplier to identify what he is selling and to try to communicate
this to his customer base. Obviously newcomers are very anxious to establish
their credentials by being scientifically accurate. Long-term suppliers with
provenance and simple supply lines don’t have to do this in the same way. All
they have to do is identify in effect that this is the material or source that
the original textbooks refer to.

I think all of us in Aromatherapy have to face up to the
main point –the oil introduced by Pierrre Franchomme and promoted by Teddy
Fearnhamm and others and used successfully in Aromatherapy was generally called
by Aromatherapists in Europe Ravensara aromatica. This is the so-called
Ravintsara from Madagascar. Whatever botanists may call it, even if it is not
the true or correct Ravensara aromatica, this is the oil that matters. It is
quite easy to see that at the beginning, Ravintsara was wrongly called
Ravensara and was, over the years, labelled Ravensara aromatica when in fact it
was Cinnamomum camphora.

In future printings Fragrant Earth will move to calling this
product Ravintsara, which will be distilled from the leaves and ex-Madagascar.
We will use the name Cinnamomum camphora L. ct cineol (ex Ravensara aromatica).
This, I am sure, will satisfy nobody but should, to those practicing therapists,
explain everything! A simple way of knowing what you have in the bottle is that
if it smells of Aniseed in any way then it is not the original Ravensara
(however, please note it is not botanically Ravensara aromatica).

It is thought that the Cinnamomum camphora tree was
introduced into Madagascar in the 19th century. Others however
suggest it was much earlier via missionaries perhaps even the Dutch. This
Ravintsara can be found growing everywhere there are people, it’s a popular plant.
You will see it quite commonly on balconies and in pots! It is not necessarily
surprising that the tree produces a different oil in Madagascar than in its own
Far Eastern heartland. Cineole, Linalol, Safrol and Nerolidol are chemo types
known to exist.

If we accept that Sonnerat was right in his identification
in the 18th century of Ravensara aromatica and assuming that
Ravintsara as a common name did not exist at the time for Cinnamomum camphora
then we have to query the use of the name R.anisata as a synonym. In 1950 a
species was identified by Danguy as Ravensara anisata because of the perfume
that came from the tree. It is now said they are one and the same thing.
However in terms of the essential oil, Ravensara anisata is nearly always sold
as representing the oil produced from the bark of the tree.This is the one with the strong Methyl
Charvicol content.The oil produced from
the leaves is sold increasingly today as Ravensara aromatica. Be aware this has
a completely different chemical composition, being mainly composed of Sabinene,
Limonene and Myrcene with Methyl Chavicol. This so-called real oil (in
botanical terms) is the one nobody wanted before!

Altogether a confusing story and one that requires a little
knowledge of suppliers and their policies. Putting things straight is no bad
thing but it takes time. No one should run away with the idea that one company
is plain ignorant or playing games of I’m the better guru. There has been
confusion in the past and I hope this article has somewhat helped to explain
the issues involved. In any event if you see Cinnamomum camphora called
anything like Ravensara coming from anywhere else than Madagascar, then watch
out!

It is the therapist who is at the working end of essential
oils. It is the therapist who sees what works. It is true that they have to
have confidence in their supplier and it is they who have to make the decision
of with whom to place their confidence and trust.

At the moment demand for Ravensara outstrips the supply and
is likely to do so for some time.It is
one of the most valuable oils in the Aromatherapy repertoire and supply
permitting has the potential for becoming a star such as Lavender or Tea
Tree.

Another star on the horizon that will give botanists a field
day, no doubt almost replicating the Ravensara botany story will be Kunzea
ambigua, with the common name of Tick Bush, from Australia. Once this becomes
popular, I can see the botanists finding alternatives but at the moment
verbally we stick to the names Kunzea and Ravensara because in popular parlance
in Aromatherapy and in the popular books that’s what they are still mostly
called.

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